Every House Needs a Balcony (25 page)

“That thing your daughter has, it's not contagious, is it? Can my little boy catch it?” she asked reproachfully.

“Tell me, do you think that stupidity is contagious? And wickedness and ignorance and nastiness?” she asked in return.

Ms. Potato Head said nothing.

“Answer me!” she screamed at the woman suddenly.

“No?” the woman said tentatively.

“Actually, I think it is,” she surprised the woman, “which is why I am taking my daughter away from here before she becomes infected by some of your evil.”

Ms. Potato Head sat in embarrassed silence, while she was beginning to really enjoy abusing her, asking if she knew the difference between stupidity and genius.

“No,” the woman replied, thinking she'd changed the subject.

“No, well, the thing is, genius has its limits. Good-bye and good riddance to you, stupid woman,” she said, and carried her daughter off, holding her in her arms as if to protect her against all evil all the way back home.

She filled the bath and put Noa and some plastic ducks into the water and scrubbed away all the nastiness from the playground, and when Noa asked her why she was crying all the time, she said she wasn't crying, it was only the bath making her eyes wet.

Noa looked at her with compassion in her eyes, and she thought to herself that God had given the world ten measures of compassion, and her daughter had taken nine of them for herself. And only one measure remained for all those other billions of people who inhabit the earth's surface. Anyway, who says that life's fair, when Noa had taken all that compassion and left so little for everyone else?

The next day was a Friday, and Friday evening is a time when God is not kind to the lonely. She was alone in her home, all alone with her depression, since her husband had taken Noa with him to spend the weekend with his sister in Jerusalem. She turned on the faucet and filled the bath to its very limit and climbed in, submerging her head in the warm water. And once again, as she had the week Noa was born, she tested her body's ability to survive without air; and she
was emotionally prepared to sink down into the waters of salvation, when the phone rang. She ignored the phone at first and tried to reinstate in herself the concentration a person needs in order to die. But the phone continued to ring and ring, aggressively, relentlessly. After counting the twentieth ring, she pulled herself out of the bath, promising the water that she'd be back directly; she wrapped herself in a towel and picked up the phone.

“Where are you?” her sister asked her.

“At home,” she replied.

“No, you're not at home,” said her sister.

“According to what?” she said impatiently, thinking about the warm water awaiting her.

“According to the fact that all the lights are off in your house,” her sister replied. “Eight o'clock on a Friday evening, you're sitting alone in a silent house, not even watching the news.” Her sister knew that she liked to watch the Friday evening news, thus making up for a whole week's worth in one go. Who needs to hear all those awful stories every day, anyway? As if life was not hard enough without news items tapping away at your soul every hour, with an added news flash every half hour.

“What's there to see?” she asked her exasperating sister, who was disturbing her plans to die.

“Quite honestly, nothing,” her sister replied. “So where are you?”

“In the bathroom,” she said. “I'm taking a shower.”

“In that case, you are spending too much time in there,” her sister said.

“How do you know? Are you watching me?” she asked, turning it into a joke.

“Yes,” her sister replied simply.

“How are you watching me?” She was curious to know.

“Through Shlomo's army binoculars,” her sister told her.

“Have you been spending all your time watching me through Shlomo's binoculars?” she asked, horrified at this violation of her privacy. Could her sister, who lived right opposite her, across the boulevard, have been using her husband's military binoculars to follow her every movement throughout the nearly two years she had been living there?

“Only since you split up,” said her older sister.

“Why are you spying on me?” She was riled.

“I've been worried about you,” her sister said. “I've been terribly worried about you. I was afraid that one day you'd lose it completely and suddenly decide to jump out of your eighth-floor window.”

“Even if I had wanted to jump, you wouldn't have been able to stop me with your army binoculars,” she said to her sister, testing her as usual.

“I would have called you immediately to distract you,” said her sister, who was wise and thought of every single thing, with the resourcefulness she had inherited from their mother. “Besides,” she added, “what are you taking so many baths for?”

“Maybe my conscience isn't clean?” she replied.

“Your conscience is pristine. Come over to my place,” she said, laying down the law. “I'll cook you the things you love best.”

“What do I love best?” she asked, still ruminating over whether she wouldn't prefer to return to the warm bath, which had probably gone cold by now.

“Artichoke with butter,” her sister replied.

“I don't want it with butter,” she bantered, as if they were still little girls and not young mothers. “Make me some mustard and mayo sauce.”

“It doesn't taste as good,” said her sister.

“I prefer my artichoke with mustard and mayo,” she insisted, angry that her sister always tried to decide for her what tasted better, forgetting completely that only seven minutes ago she had contemplated sinking under the water.

“Come on, nuisance,” said her sister.

She went back to the bathroom, pulled the plug out of the bath, and watched for a few seconds as the water swirled its way to the sea. She didn't even bother rinsing herself off. She had a clean conscience, and with it, she got dressed and went across to her sister, who would enfold her in her concern.

On Sunday she took Noa to the hospital to have her hearing tested; it appeared that Noa had lost her hearing completely in one ear and would need a hearing aid in her other ear.

She broke down. All the way home she wept like someone demented, and when Noa's caretaker arrived, she called her husband's office and asked for Adi.

“She's not in,” the secretary told her.

“Is she no longer working there?” she asked the secretary.

“Of course she is. But today is her day off,” she added.

“Can I have her address, please?” she asked politely. “I am calling from the courier service; I have a parcel here that needs to be delivered to her address.”

The generous secretary supplied her with Adi's address, and she made her way straight there, taking with her all her pain and frustration from Noa's audio test.

She rang the bell, and a chubby young woman opened the door. She was quite surprised to see the fatso who had ruined her family.

“Adi?” she asked her.

“Adi,” Fatso called out, “someone here for you.”

Adi emerged from a room and approached her roommate, who remained standing in the doorway.

She stuck her foot in the door. Adi walked toward the door and stood next to Fatso. She was taller than her and appeared quite strong.

“Are you Adi?” she asked, keeping her foot in the door to prevent anyone from trying to slam it in her face.

“I am,” she replied.

“Are you the person who fucks around with people you work with?” she asked. She didn't, of course, wish to give her the honor of admitting that it had been a love affair, and before the girl had had a chance to reply, she gave her two
powerful slaps, one to the right cheek with her right hand, followed immediately with another to the left cheek with her left hand.

Adi, who knew of course who she was—because people don't usually take the trouble to introduce themselves when they are about to clout someone with six months' worth of accumulated fury—tried to shut the door. She pushed the door wide open and laid into Adi, one vigorous blow after another.

“Hadass,” Adi called out, and Fatso tried to hit her from the right.

“Don't you touch me,” she said to the chubby roommate. “I have no business with you,” and she continued beating Adi with all her strength; she pushed Hadass a little to the side so as to get her out of the way. Hadass continued to wave her little fists in front of her, while Adi, who had managed to recover from the first shock, dealt her several hefty blows to the face, and even scratched her on the shoulder when she turned toward Hadass, who continued to pester her. The sight of Fatso fighting with all her might on behalf of her whore of a friend inflamed her even further—how dare she prevent her from carrying out the job for which she had come here? She grabbed Fatso by the shoulders and pushed her into the depths of the corridor with a strength she had never known she possessed.

“Don't you move away from there or I'll kill you,” she told her, and Fatso dug herself deep into the corridor, no longer to be seen. And then she turned her attention back to Adi.

She beat her as she had learned as a girl growing up in Wadi Salib. Whenever her sister felt threatened by some other kids, all she had to do was say that she'd call her little sister, and they would immediately stop picking on her.

Adi of course put up a fierce resistance and hit back, but there is no one alive who can triumph over a woman burning with the fury of a mother who has just learned that her daughter is hard of hearing.

They lashed out at each other with all their might. For a moment it occurred to her that she might after all love her man, and that by beating Adi, she was actually fighting to get him back.

When she decided that she herself had taken enough of a beating, she put a stranglehold on Adi and knocked her to the ground, kicked her a few times in the stomach and legs, followed up with some juicy name-calling—bitch, whore, cunt, and all the text necessary to remind the girl where she had come from—and went back home to her hearing-impaired daughter.

The following morning she got a telephone call from the police to say that a complaint had been lodged against her for grievous bodily harm and she was required to go down to the station.

She arrived at the station, where she was directed to an investigations officer who told her that she was being questioned under caution. She didn't know what this meant, but he proceeded to read out the long list of accusations against
her, followed by another list provided by the hospital, where Adi had gone to have her wounds dressed. She listened intently and nodded her head. When he finished reading, she told him that all of it was true, except that he had omitted one important thing.

“What was that?” the officer asked.

“It says nothing about the fact that she was my husband's mistress, and that I had gone to her place to have a conversation with her. I wanted to explain to her my situation with my sick daughter, who has also lost her hearing. All I did was to insist on my right to talk to her logically, to impress on her the need for her to leave the place in which she and my husband are employed, and to stop destroying my family.” Of course she wasn't being entirely accurate with the facts she presented to the officer.

“And what happened?” He wanted to know a little more.

“Well, you know, things heated up, and one thing led to another, and I slapped her on the face and she gave me one back and we ended up having a fight. It happens among you men too, doesn't it? What would you have done if you'd been in my place, if your wife had taken a lover? Wouldn't you have gone and tried to have a heart-to-heart conversation with him?” she wondered.

He wanted to know how her daughter was doing, and when she told him the truth about the way they spent days on end in hospital while her husband was fucking his brains out with his whore, the police officer was so sympathetic to
her and hated Adi so much that in the end he said he didn't understand how anyone could cheat on a woman like her.

“So what are you going to do with the complaint?” she asked the police officer who so wholeheartedly sympathized with her.

He scrunched up the paper into a tiny ball, which he then tossed at a wastepaper basket a short distance away.

He hit. The paper ball dropped straight into the basket.

“Just let me see her dare show her face in the police station,” said the police officer. “I'll have her thrown out on her ear, the nasty little bitch.”

Her husband called her that evening.

“You see, it's because of things like this that I no longer love you,” he told her.

“What things?” she asked.

“Because you are uncivilized,” he said, sounding extremely agitated. “It seems no one ever took the trouble to educate you properly.”

“Yes, it does seem so. Do you want a divorce?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he told her.

“So do I,” she said.

“Let's go for a walk,” she said to Noa, and took her to the beach. They stood on the breakwater and watched as the waves exploded against the rocks. The sea was especially stormy. She pulled off her wedding ring, threw it into the sea, and told Noa that she was giving her dowry back to God.

Noa asked her what a dowry was.

“It's a piece of baggage that you carry about with you from childhood,” she explained to her four-and-a-half-year-old daughter.

When they arrived back at the apartment, the telephone was ringing stubbornly, and she was afraid that the anonymous caller would hang up before she could get the door opened.

The telephone went on ringing, and she picked up the receiver.

“Hello,” she said.

“Rina that in the Bible means joy and in Ladino means a queen?” she heard on the other end of the line.

“Hello, Shmuel,” she replied. “How are you?”